The Great Escape Review

Developer	Pivotal Games
Publisher	Gotham Games
Genre	Action

If you’re an old film buff like me, you’ll know the The Great Escape as one of those classic 1960’s films that holds a special place in our hearts. Steve McQueen remains one of the rarefied action heroes that lit up the screen in whatever movie he was cast in. Considered by some to be the quintessential “caper” movie, Great Escape has always seemed ripe for video game translation. It’s no surprise, then, that someone decided to take the great film and allow gamers to experience it first hand. It’s Gotham Games who has the honors of being the brave souls who took on the task of turning a beloved film into a game as exciting and nail biting as the movie.

Gameplay - The gameplay in TGE is a real mixed bag. Some of ideas are great, others are simply poorly executed and some are just plain ripped off. In any given level you could be commenting on how cool the level is and in the next breath cursing the name of person who programmed it.

Your main job in this game is (take a guess) to escape and you’ll do it in about as many ways as you can think of. From escaping a burning plane to escaping the obvious Nazi prison camp, your job is to get out of whatever environment you happen to be in.

This motif lends itself to a lot of cool gaming ideas and Gotham tries more than a few of them. While the concept bodes well for the gamer, the execution simply doesn’t live up to expectations. While escaping from a prison is a very cool premise, TGE boils the experience down into a bunch of little object gathering quests. Go to the area of the prison, avoid the guards, follow your compass to the item (ripped off from Medal of Honor, by the way) get the item. Go back with the item, avoid the guards, use the item and get a new objective that tells you to go somewhere else, avoid the guards and get a new item. Rinse, repeat. While some moments have you going through a cool level sequence to get an item, most just boil down to “Please let me get this and move on to the next stage.” This type of thing just shouldn’t be going through a gamer’s head when you’re doing something as potentially exciting as escaping a Nazi camp.

The controls are actually pretty well done in TGE. Your character moves using the left stick and your characters direction is controlled by the right stick. Crouching is done with one button and opening doors, etc., along with item control, takes up another two. Punching or choking a guard is done with the right trigger, which is the only real awkward aspect of the control. I found combat and disabling a guard to be extremely wonkey and I just avoided it the whole game. You actually have to fight through a portion of one level and it stands out as one of the worst moments in the game.

In one of the most interesting control choices I’ve seen in a while, you use the directional pad in this game to use your “sneaking” camera. Basically, it lets you peer around corners or over boxes. While using the directional pad for camera control may seem weird at first ( it did to me, at any rate ) it worked well once I got used to it and I think it could be used in that capacity in future games.

The enemy AI is one of the poor aspects of this game. I found it to simply be too clunky and causes a good deal of frustration. Some enemies seem to appear behind you and bust you right away with some sort of sixth sense, while others look right at you and let you meander by. You never really know when to take a chance and when to be cautious, and my default was always to wait for a guard to go out of sight before I would chance a movement. Maybe this was what Gotham was intending, I’m not sure. At any rate, some consistency would have been nice.

While we’re on the subject of being caught by guards, this is the place where I must mention the most frustrating part about TGE: In this game, you will get caught often. Get used to it, that’s just how it’s going to be. However, if the game is going to be a trial and error sort of game, then for crying out loud, let’s make the loading times MUCH less painful, PLEASE. On the first level alone, I must have gotten caught about ten times, and after each one of those I have to hit “Load Saved Game”, sit though a screen that loads the game saves list, hit my game, sit through another loading screen where it confirms my choice, then ANOTHER loading screen while it loads my game up. All in all it takes a good 2-3 minutes to load up your game. It feels like 10. While this is a small gripe it really does get annoying after you do it about five times. After that many loading screens, you start longing for the days of the cartridge to come back.

There are some cool things to the game, like the shooting out the gunnery seat in the plane and avoiding enemy gunfire on a motorcycle. Or sneaking around a dimly lit castle courtyard to find an enemy uniform. In addition, it’s cool to see the locations from the film and get to sneak around in them. All in all, the premise is cool and some of the bits are very well done. But there are enough annoying things to make me not want to play it at great length. That’s just a shame.

Graphics - The Steve McQueen character model in TGE was pretty damn realistic, so much so that it bordered on creepy. I enjoyed the dim lighting and the flash of the floodlights as you avoid the guards. I enjoyed the use of shadows and lighting that help set the tense mood of the game.

I didn’t like how the environments looked washed out. Maybe I’m just being picky, but for a game modeled after a movie, the look of the game should be a whole lot sharper and closer the to the look of the film. It looks as if Gotham tried to match the film in some of the cutaway scenes, but I didn’t feel it in the game itself. It just could have used a fuller, richer graphical world.

Sound - The music fits that game very well. Military themes, heroic punches for when you do something valiant, scary, suspenseful strings in places where you sneak around, exciting “get the hell out of there” music for when it’s exciting and you need to… well, get the hell out of there.

The sound effects are pretty good the entire game, but I do have one little nitpick. Why the hell did Gotham feel the need to rip off the whole drum roll sound effect from Medal of Honor? After every menu screen choice, there it is, drum roll. They already ripped off the compass idea, couldn’t they come up with another thing for the menu confirmation sound? No big deal, but it just makes you feel like you’re playing another Medal of Honor rip off.

Overall Value - As a rental, I could see TGE serving quite well. It’s fun for awhile and if you can stand the never ending loading screen sequence, you should have a good time. The game has many good ideas and some great things going for it, but not enough for me to recommend a purchase. If you’re a huge fan of the movie, then by all means pick it up. It has the classic Stalag Luft III from the movie and the rest of the game gets into some interesting back story on the major players and how they got ito the Stalag in the first place. All in all, it’s an OK effort, but could have had more.

Review by Aaron hilden